When we use LLMs in a specialized domain, such as the operations of any reasonably-large organization, there is a lot of specialized vocabulary. Such words and specialized meanings will be foreign to an LLM because they aren't in its training set, making it harder for the LLM to be effective when doing tasks in that domain. One technique to aid this is to use an LLM to generate a glossary of the terminology in that domain, and make this glossary available for any LLMs doing work in t...

Ufuk made a comment that he enjoyed my description of SSA from bytecode in Aaron’s livestream with me . While filming the livestream—an intro to ZJIT internals—I got a little nervous that people would shy away from our 1900 line add_iseq_to_hir function. This function is responsible for converting CRuby’s stack based bytecode for the YARV virtual machine into a high-level SSA IR for ZJIT to analyze and optimize. It takes bytecode that looks roughly like this: push 3 push 4 add ...

Earlier this year I bought this stunning TYAN Titan Pro AT motherboard , on which one of Clara’s stickers is perched: This board appealed to me for a few reasons: It was in immaculate condition. It wasn’t sold as “new old stock”, but I expect it was never used. TYAN boards are some of my favourites from the time. They’re always clearly labelled labelled, logically designed, and included above-average documentation. This was workstation-grade kit. It came bundle...

Each fall I try to predict the upcoming job market for theoretical computer science faculty and give suggestions to those pursuing these positions. Last year I wrote  that we should get set for a rocky ride, with AI’s disruption of computer science, fiscal stress at universities, and new U.S. policies affecting visas and funding. Rocky indeed. The job market for computer science graduates continues to decline and with it undergraduate enrollment in the discipline. That should crater demand f...

I am not a believer in glue work 1 . Processes that can only be sustained by the unrewarded sacrifice of engineers ought to die. Now that LLMs are writing most of our code, does that free human engineers up to do more glue work ? No, it doesn’t. I think glue work is actually less important to companies than it was in the 2010s. Let’s go through four reasons why. First, AI decreases the amount of coordination needed to ship . The magnifying effect of AI agents means that any single en...

I’m thinking about extending this set of debugging examples with the more complex examples described below. I’d be very grateful for feedback: would they be useful? Would they be useful to you ? What other examples could be included, or should be included instead of some of the ones I’ve outlined? Log Ingestion Pipeline A command-line Python tool that reads application log files, normalizes each line, extracts structured fields, and loads them into SQLite for later querying. W...

By Shreya S Ramanujam , Yongce Li , Afshine Amidi , Sina Ghiassian , Benjamin Klein . Introduction Picture this — you’re home after a long day at work and can’t wait to catch up on Bridgerton. You log on to Netflix, search for “Bridgerton” and land on this screen: If this sounds familiar, you already know what a synopsis is — it’s a short glimpse into what a viewer can expect to see in a show. We see two types of synopses here: a series-level synopsis describing th...

Tekkoh on an iPhone Duo opened flat: the margin of the day on the left, your words on the right. (All the screenshots here are of a made-up demo journal.) Tekkoh is a journal for iPhone. Tekkoh on an iPhone Duo opened flat: the margin of the day on the left, your words on the right. (All the screenshots here are of a made-up demo journal.) Tekkoh is a journal for iPhone.

One of my ongoing research interests is understanding the nature of technological progress: How does new technology come into the world and improve over time? What sort of factors affect it? How, in general, should we think about it? I’ve come at this question from a few different angles: posts looking at the operations and legacy of Bell Labs, posts looking at how specific technologies improved over time, posts looking at how frequent multiple invention is and how long we wait for ...

I see a lot of discussion around “TUI vs. GUI” for coding agents. This discussion is often of the form: “the more I use Claude Code/Codex/Pi, the more I’ve outgrown the TUI and want to use a GUI app”. The comment that nudged me to write this is in this recent HN discussion : I used to use ChatGPT/Claude in the TUI up until like 3 months ago, but my usage of LLMs has exploded - many sessions across many projects. I feel like I outgrew the TUI and now I’m using ChatGPT/Claude desk...

Bjarne Stroustrup, in the flesh. *Pops cork*. It looks like it happened! A historic first, for better or worse. This is a sign that C++ is (still) struggling with its governance (see a previous article on cultural issues within C++ here ). This is a big deal even if you do not care about programming languages. C++ is arguably the most important programming language in existence. Your computer runs on C or C++. The web browser you are using to read this is written in C++. ~All pro...

Our fast_float library parses numbers such as -731.51 into binary floating-point values. It is part of GCC’s C++ standard library, among others. It is fast: often a few nanoseconds per number. Parsing a number means making decisions. Is there a sign? How many digits are there? Where is the decimal point? Is the processor rounding in the default mode? Each decision is a branch in the code. Modern processors do not wait to know the outcome of a branch: they guess, and they keep working. Wh...

Our house has a box room, full of boxes that we still haven't unpacked from our last move. A couple of weeks ago something in that room started intermittently beeping . The beeps were far enough apart that standing in the room and trying to determine the source of the noise was frustrating, and I really didn't want to dig through every one of those boxes. So I had Claude Code build Beep Locator , a software system for triangulating the source of a mysterious beep using multiple devices scatter...

For our last movie night we watched Princess Mononoke . I remembered loving that movie when I was younger, but watching it as an adult made me once again realize how Miyazaki has a way of expressing diverging sides without picking one. The film shows people, animals and spirits with legitimate and largely incompatible needs, and each faction is further engaged in infighting. A central arc of the story is Lady Eboshi’s Irontown, which gives people who were largely rejected by society work,...

Japan’s SLIM spacecraft on the Moon as imaged by the LEV-2 crawler bot (inset image) and India’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter (background). An arrow points to the tiny lander on the image’s right. Images: JAXA / TOMY / SONY / ISRO / Chandra Tungathurthi This story pieces together insights from experts at JAXA, NASA, and ISRO. On January 19, 2024, Japan’s solar-powered Smart Lander for Investigating Moon ( SLIM) lander made a lopsided-but-successful touchdown on Earth’s cosmic companion. ...

I recently took on a project to implement a language model on an FPGA. In simple terms, a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is an IC that can be reconfigured to implement hardware circuit designs written in a Hardware Description Language (HDL) such as SystemVerilog. They are particularly interesting because you don't run software on them the way you would using microcontrollers. Instead, you reconfigure the chip into a hardware design. This gives you things that you couldn't get in software ...

TOKYO (November 12th, 2026) — Shield and NIPPI Corporation have signed a contract for Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul (MRO) operations for V-BAT in Japan. The first domestic MRO agreement of its kind includes provisions for NIPPI to establish in-country technical capability for Group 3 unmanned aircraft systems. NIPPI is one of Japan’s leading aerospace maintenance and manufacturing companies. It has supported Japan Self-Defense Forces and United States Navy aircraft for decades and is we...

Contents Click on the blue boxes to go to the corresponding section: futures pre The Present asi Do we reach ASI? pre->asi misuse Misuse Doom pre->misuse butler Butlerian Jihad pre->butler align Do we solve alignment? asi->align Yes auto Full automation? asi->auto No whatkind What kind of alignment? align->whatkin...

Ambering network — Temporal adaptation. Rooted years stand tall. Ambering network — Temporal adaptation. Rooted years stand tall. Ambering network — Temporal adaptation. Rooted years stand tall.

This post demonstrates how to use monads in the Lean programming language (Lean 4, to be specific). If you're not familiar with Lean, this part of the language is very similar to other functional programming languages, like Haskell or OCaml. Motivating example - evaluating expressions Suppose we want to write a simple numerical expression evaluator that supports numbers with addition and division: inductive Expr where | num : Int → Expr | add : Expr → ...

Just another day in Casa Quirk. 🤣 Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment . Just another day in Casa Quirk. 🤣 Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ ...

By a mile, the iPhone Duo has garnered more questions about what I think about it than any other phone I’ve ever had. It’s clearly a phone that has people intrigued, so I thought I’d jot down some loose, unorganized thoughts about what I think about it after about ten days. If I could sum all my thoughts up into one word, it’d simply be “fun”. I think for the vast majority of people, myself included, the iPhone 18 Pro is a more practical phone that through scientific analysis y...

Some metrics When I set up the infrastructure for Casuarina Linux I repurposed an AMD AM4 system with Ryzen 9 5950X 16-Core CPU (105W TDP) and 32Gb of DDR4 RAM as the build server. I set it up in our laundry, connected it via a smart plug, and reset its counters. Over the course of the project I would regularly pull package updates from Chimera Linux , build and install them locally, and then push them to the repo, which would trigger Buildbot to build and publish them. 💡 A...